I

4 Dec 2005

Just as I was
about to go to bed, one of my fans enthusiastically forwarded me this article.
Badiou is definitely the flavor of the month. This article is a succinct summary
of a slice of intellectual history, but what blows me away is how fundamentally
unconscious Badiou seems to be of the underlying dynamics I see motivating his
intellectual universe. It shows how thoroughly bourgeois all French intellectuals
are, esp. those of the hard leftthey're the worst! To paraphrase Lenny Bruce:
this is so bankrupt, it's thrilling. I'll have more to say when I've had a second
go-round with this essay.

II

4 Dec 2005

First,
some quotes, with comments:

BADIOU: "a French philosophical
moment of the second half of the 20th century which, toute proportion gardée,
bears comparison to the examples of classical Greece and enlightenment Germany."

DUMAIN:
But why this moment, or the others, and with what import in the grand scheme?

BADIOU:
"Sartres foundational work, Being and Nothingness, appeared
in 1943 and the last writings of Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, date from
the early 1990s. The moment of French philosophy develops between the two of them,
and includes Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault,
Derrida and Lacan as well as Sartre and Deleuzeand myself, maybe."

DUMAIN:
What was the state of French philosophy before this moment? Kojeve, I've read,
was the grand central station for the introduction of Hegel, which influenced
all these people? What was French philosophy doing before this turn? Bachelard
was a philosopher of science as well as of the poetic imagination: doesn't he
go back a little further? What about the previous state of French philosophy of
science? What came out of Poincaré, or of Emile Meyerson? Doesn't Barthes
figure into this scenario?

BADIOU: "To think the philosophical
origins of this moment we need to return to the fundamental division that occurred
within French philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, with the emergence
of two contrasting currents. In 1911, Bergson gave two celebrated lectures at
Oxford, which appeared in his collection La pensée et le mouvement.
In 1912simultaneously, in other wordsBrunschvicg published Les
étapes de la philosophie mathématique. Coming on the eve of
the Great War, these interventions attest to the existence of two completely distinct
orientations. In Bergson we find what might be called a philosophy of vital interiority,
a thesis on the identity of being and becoming; a philosophy of life and change.
This orientation will persist throughout the 20th century, up to and including
Deleuze. In Brunschvicgs work, we find a philosophy of the mathematically
based concept: the possibility of a philosophical formalism of thought and of
the symbolic, which likewise continues throughout the century, most specifically
in Lévi-Strauss, Althusser and Lacan.

"From the start of the
century, then, French philosophy presents a divided and dialectical character.
On one side, a philosophy of life; on the other, a philosophy of the concept.
This debate between life and concept will be absolutely central to the period
that follows. At stake in any such discussion is the question of the human subject,
for it is here that the two orientations coincide."

DUMAIN:
This is most fascinating, and presents the essence of the problem before us. And
the question is: why this dynamic? And then, Is there an unnamed dynamic underlying
this ostensible dynamic? How does this compare to the duality of positivism and
irrationalism one can find elsewhere in the past century and a half of western
philosophy?

Badiou names a dynamic, but there's more to be said about it.
(1) Badiou names a conspicuous feature of French thought: the tendency towards
formalism and schematism. This is neither British, nor I think, particularly German.
Here there is neither German depth nor positivist reduction, but a different twist.
(2) Bergson is counterpoised to this tendency. But Bergson is not only a vitalist,
but an intuitionist, a mystical reactionary of the worst sort. Bergson's incredible
popularity arrives at a moment of historical rebellion against a fully schematized
and mathematized world view; it is itself, paradoxically, an abstraction: pure
intuition, the flow of lived experience, counterpoised against a completely reified
social world? And why is this reification perfected foremost in France? This is
the question Badiou doesn't pose.

BADIOU: "A first definition
of the French philosophical moment would therefore be in terms of the conflict
over the human subject, since the fundamental issue at stake in this conflict
is that of the relationship between life and concept.

"We could, of
course, take the quest for origins further back and describe the division of French
philosophy as a split over the Cartesian heritage. In one sense, the postwar philosophical
moment can be read as an epic discussion about the ideas and significance of Descartes,
as the philosophical inventor of the category of the subject. Descartes was a
theoretician both of the physical bodyof the animal-machineand of
pure reflection. He was thus concerned with both the physics of phenomena and
the metaphysics of the subject. All the great contemporary philosophers have written
on Descartes . . ."

DUMAIN: Descartes set up, abstractly, the
philosophical duality of the modern world, of the rising bourgeoisie breaking
free of its feudal bonds. Also emerging is a new twist on the division of mental
and manual labor. (As, e.g., CLR James et al [1950]
have noted, this conception becomes embodied in the administrative-industrial
organization of society to come, finally perfected in Stalinist state capitalismbodiless
planning totally organizes mindless physical labor.) A number of analysts have
noted thus. The question remains, though: why this struggle over Descartes, specifically
in France and specifically in the 20th century?

BADIOU: "French
philosophers went seeking something in Germany, then, through the work of Hegel,
Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. What was it that they sought? In a phrase: a
new relation between concept and existence."

DUMAIN: This is
eminently logical, but . . . Where was French philosophy at the moment when this
trend began? What happened to the once fashionable Bergson?

BADIOU:
"The second operation, no less important, concerns science. French philosophers
sought to wrest science from the exclusive domain of the philosophy of knowledge
by demonstrating that, as a mode of productive or creative activity, and not merely
an object of reflection or cognition, it went far beyond the realm of knowledge.
They interrogated science for models of invention and transformation that would
inscribe it as a practice of creative thought, comparable to artistic activity,
rather than as the organization of revealed phenomena."

DUMAIN:
This immediately makes me think of Bachelard. But again, where's the why?

BADIOU:
"The third operation is a political one. The philosophers of this period
all sought an in-depth engagement of philosophy with the question of politics.
. . . This fundamental desire to engage philosophy with the political situation
transforms the relation between concept and action."

DUMAIN:
Why this particular evolution, as opposed, to say, that of Lukacs, or of the Frankfurt
School? Note that if the German turn was necessary, then the French lagged behind
the Germans in some respect. But why this appropriation of German thought and
the French twist on it? And how do the two streams compare in value? How does
Sartre's Being and Nothingnessstrapped in an impossible dualism ridiculed
from all cornersfrom Marcuse to Farber and back againcompare to the
German achievement?

BADIOU: "The fourth operation has to do
with the modernization of philosophy, in a sense quite distinct from the cant
of successive government administrations. French philosophers evinced a profound
attraction to modernity. They followed contemporary artistic, cultural and social
developments very closely. . . . In all this, philosophy was seeking a new relation
between the concept and the production of formsartistic, social, or forms
of life. Modernization was thus the quest for a new way in which philosophy could
approach the creation of forms."

DUMAIN: Again, why the particular
configuration of French thought, in comparison to German, in achieving these aims?
There must have been a particular blockage that had to be overcome. Later, I think,
I'll be saying something about the surrealists, Sartre, and CLR James.

BADIOU:
"The question of forms, and of the intimate relations of philosophy with
the creation of forms, was of crucial importance. Clearly, this posed the issue
of the form of philosophy itself: one could not displace the concept without inventing
new philosophical forms. It was thus necessary not just to create new concepts
but to transform the language of philosophy. This prompted a singular alliance
between philosophy and literature which has been one of the most striking characteristics
of contemporary French philosophy."

DUMAIN: Literature and language.
The breakout of conceptual confinement paralleled or even necessitated a breakout
from linguistic confinement. How, different, then the use of language in France
from Germany, which after all, was no stranger to linguistic innovation in either
area. But yet the French must have felt the most straight-jacketed. That's where
the surrealists came in, after the war.

BADIOU: "The surrealists
also played an important role. They too were eager to shake up relations regarding
the production of forms, modernity, the arts; they wanted to invent new modes
of life. If theirs was largely an aesthetic programme, it paved the way for the
philosophical programme of the 1950s and 60s...."

And:

"It
is at this stage that we witness a spectacular change in philosophical writing.
Forty years on we have, perhaps, grown accustomed to the writing of Deleuze, Foucault,
Lacan; we have lost the sense of what an extraordinary rupture with earlier philosophical
styles it represented."

And:

"There
was, then, both a transformation of philosophical expression and an effort to
shift the frontiers between philosophy and literature. We should recallanother
innovationthat Sartre was also a novelist and playwright (as am I). The
specificity of this moment in French philosophy is to play upon several different
registers in language, displacing the borders between philosophy and literature,
between philosophy and drama."

DUMAIN: Here we see an impetus
to develop a new way of writing. What is not clear in many of these cases, is
an intrinsic connection to the development of new abstract concepts. How do the
literary and the abstract motivations necessarily mutually motivate one another,
if they do? Badiou will then discuss the role of Freud, but there's already something
unstated that shouldn't pass unexamined. German philosophical writing is notoriously
difficult, syntactically convoluted, dense and allusive, with a record of prodigious
terminological innovation, yet something different seems to be going on. The Frankfurt
School was up to its eyeballs in Freud, as well as aesthetics, but . . . . ? Is
the difference merely that the German philosophers did not feel the need to write
novels, plays, poems? Something else is going on that needs to be teased out.
It has something to do with "Cartesianism", with literary style, with
a rebellion against rigidity and classicism, with a particular configuration governing
the rebellion and the nature of what it rebelled against.

III

4
Dec 2005

I'm going to defer addressing the questions I posed last time,
and pick up with the section "With and against Freud."

BADIOU:
"At stake, finally, in this invention of a new writing, is the enunciation
of the new subject; of the creation of this figure within philosophy, and the
restructuring of the battlefield around it. For this can no longer be the rational,
conscious subject that comes down to us from Descartes; it cannot be, to use a
more technical expression, the reflexive subject. The contemporary human subject
has to be something murkier, more mingled in life and the body, more extensive
than the Cartesian model; more akin to a process of production, or creation, that
concentrates much greater potential forces inside itself."

DUMAIN:
I am singularly unimpressed with this stancethough I understand the historical
statement he's makingbecause the Germans were just as deeply engaged with
Freud and with all these issues, sans the pretentious rebellion against Cartesianism.
But this is too delicious, for Badiou names a dynamic he's trapped in himself,
like all these people, and thinks he's diagnosed while remaining obtuse. This
is so delicious I'll have to return to it again and again.

BADIOU:
"At issue, most fundamentally, has been the division of French philosophy
between, on one side, what I would call an existential vitalism, originating with
Bergson and running through Sartre, Foucault and Deleuze, and on the other a conceptual
formalism, derived from Brunschvicg and continuing through Althusser and Lacan.
Where the two paths cross is on the question of the subject, which might ultimately
be defined, in terms of French philosophy, as the being that brings forth the
concept."

DUMAIN: I see why Sartre is put on the one side, esp.
opposite Althusser et al. But wasn't Sartre himself remarkably Cartesian and Kantian,
and opposed to the surrealists as well as the spell of poetry? Sartre was deep-sixed
posthumously precisely because of his affirmation of the subject, which the other
side was sadomasochistically bent on smashing. And remember Barthes' assault on
the concept of Man. This is a specifically petty bourgeois French preoccupationnobody
else in the world except their groupies takes this puffed-up foolishness seriously.

BADIOU:
"The relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis within French philosophy
is just this, one of competition and complicity, of fascination and hostility,
love and hatred. No wonder the drama between them has been so violent, so complex."

Then,
under "Paths of Greatness," Badiou outlines 6 key features of the French
philosophical moment. I won't reiterate them here, but do read them.

BADIOU:
"Such is the French philosophical moment, its programme, its high ambition.
To identify it further, its one essential desirefor every identity is the
identity of a desirewas to turn philosophy into an active form of writing
that would be the medium for the new subject. And by the same token, to banish
the meditative or professorial image of the philosopher; to make the philosopher
something other than a sage, and so other than a rival to the priest. Rather,
the philosopher aspired to become a writer-combatant, an artist of the subject,
a lover of invention, a philosophical militantthese are the names for the
desire that runs through this period: the desire that philosophy should act in
its own name."

DUMAIN: What a load of shit! The French intellectual
and cultural system is the most centralized, bureaucratic, class-confined and
elitist in the entire history of humanity. Striking a pose like this is just one
other route to the top. This is self-deception at its peak. This is so incredible,
I'm almost speechless, but not quite . . . .

IV

9
April 2006

The star system in France also relates to its highly centralized
cultural system. The concept of cultural capital now in vogue could never have
originated anywhere but in France, and itself is the product of how bourgeois
culture emerged out of aristocratic culture, France being the cultural capital
of European feudalism. Furthermore, French philosophy, with its penchant for impersonal,
schematic, and quasi-mathematical formalized theoretical schemes, reflects the
conditions of the French educational and cultural system, and even the rebellion
against it, with a penchant for irrationalism, linguistic play, psychoanalysis,
obsessions with the body, etc., is determined and wholly encapsulated by the very
same conditions. And if you take a cold hard look at all the innovations in French
philosophy since the introduction of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger in the 1920s-30,
you should find it all rather inferior to what the German philosophical tradition
had already accomplished with the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.

V

27
July 2009

On Badiou's six points:

1. Eliminate separation of concept
and existence? Pretentious drivel. "Existence" is purely academic, and
in fact, the separation is greater than ever.

2. Taking philosophy out of
the academy? Are you kidding? This was done far more sincerely and effectively
60 years ago.

3. Abandon opposition between knowledge and action? More pretense.

4.
To make philosophy a real political intervention? Compared to what now? More pretense.

5.
Question of the subject? French anti-humanism is of no importance whatever. The
German tradition has said everything needed to be said on the subject.

6.
New style of philosophical exposition? Heaven help us!

I find this entire
program utterly worthless. . .

VI

See also the following
haphazardly selected items. Not all are listed to cast aspersions on their authors
or subject matter, but they do amplify somenot all!directions in French
philosophy. One finds here various contributions to various trends, for example,
French Marxism and postmodernism. Omitted, for example, are French analytical
philosophers. The conflict between Benda and Bergson early in the 20th century,
as well as the broader contextualization by Hughes, is relevant here. Read points
out Althusser's key issues concerning philosophy. Balibar and Macherey probably
accomplished far more. Schrift emphasizes the institutional context of French
philosophy, which he believes accounts for its peculiar traits. Badiou's perspective
is not all there is.

Benda, Julien. The Treason of the Intellectuals (La
Trahison Des Clercs), translated by Richard Aldington, with a new introduction
by Roger Kimball. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007. (Translation
first published 1928; French original, 1927.) See also my amazon.com
reviews of July 12, 2006:

Of Benda:

I
am alarmed by Amazon.com's links to "similar" right-wing books. The
conservative thrust of other customer reviewers is flat-out ignorant. To get a
better appraisal of Benda's philosophical outlook, a look at his other work is
in order. A good source on Benda's ouevre is Julien Benda (1956)
by Robert Judson Niess.

Another good source is also
a classic: Consciousness and Society by H. Stuart Hughes. To be
sure, Benda was an uncompromising partisan of the Enlightenment and democracy,
but his provincial, traditional, classical education made a control freak out
of him. Benda lacked flexibility and could not with sufficient concreteness engage
the contemporary trends he rejectedrecent developments in literature as
well as irrationalist philosophy. (Benda's nemesis was Henri Bergson, a point
in his favor.)

There is also a pro-Benda tendency
on the left. Recent examples are Russell Jacoby's The End of Utopia
and Edward W. Said's Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith
Lectures (see my amazon.com review). Apart from what I call 'left Benda-ism',
there is a rich history of public intellectuals as well as academics who advocate
or practice free-floating intellectualism combined with political radicalism,
including Richard Wright, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Noam
Chomsky, and Alvin Gouldner. In fact, Karl Marx was just this type of individual,
as Gouldner pointed out.

Of Said:

This is
a short popular introduction to the social role of intellectuals, taking off from
the polarity of Julien Benda (free-floating) vs. Antonio Gramsci (organic) intellectuals.
While Benda has always had a conservative flavor, his advocacy of independence
and integrity (as opposed to his conservative notion of the intellectual's obligation
to the eternal verities) is nonetheless important, so Said could be considered
a left Benda-ite (as could Russell Jacoby). Said advocates the independence as
well as the engagement of free-floating and academic intellectuals. He writes
of the difficulties of negotiating the cosmopolitan and the national commitments
of intellectuals, also of the experience of exile and marginalization. He also
addresses the polarity of professionalism and amateurism, holding to the side
of the "amateurs", without disavowing membership in academic institutions.
He prefers the role of "speaking truth to power", which also means avoiding
the twin temptations of self-submission to gods that inevitably fail and apostatic
dogma-hopping.

Burwick, Frederick; Douglass, Paul; eds.
The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Cambridge
[UK]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. See table
of contents and publisher
description.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and
Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930. Originally
published: New York: Knopf, 1958. Latest edition, with a new introduction by Stanley
Hoffman: New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002. My edition: New York:
Vintage Books, 1961. See also "Consciousness
and Society: A Review" by R.
Dumain.